JOE BAGEANT: Adam Smith meets Cousin Ronnie's Boy

[Tace]

That ain't no class underclass; it's 250 million rugged individuals being pissed on

By Joe Bageant -- World News Trust

Unbelievable as it seems today, there was a time when such people as doctors and lawyers did not necessarily live apart from the dirt front yards and Saturday night domestic scraps of the laboring class. The doctor who delivered me in 1946, the most prosperous in town by all accounts, lived just a few short blocks from the rundown Kent Street "white trash and nigger street" my parents called home. His fee for dragging my screaming ass into the light was an exorbitant $100 -- and for a caesarian birth at that -- because the U.S. Army was writing the check. The good doctor lived close enough that my old man could walk a five-dollar payment over to his house on payday, close enough that I could see his rooftop from my upstairs bedroom window. As a kid, knowing such an educated, prosperous man lived so near was somehow comforting. And at least it gave an example of what one might possibly aspire to, given the education.

Not that the working people then generally aspired to an education. In those days most folks could make a living without being very educated, or even very bright. A high school education was adequate for the jobs available in East Coast agriculture and manufacturing based town like Winchester. As for the professions, our medical and legal needs were meet by a handful of physicians and semi-savory lawyers ground out by the University of Virginia, "men of tradition" who made much of graduating from "Mistah Jeffah-sun's University," then went about their business of real estate theft and keeping the bubbas out of jail. As for teachers, nearby Shepherdstown State Teachers College provided the class in between the bubbas ("Yore Honor I never meant to kill that guy with my truck, I was only trying to take out his mailbox …") and the country club lawyers. But overall, life required little education. Nobody was yet writing computer programs to put multibillion-dollar cybernetic nuclear dildos in outer space. It was just plain American life in a plain American town. I know I'm sounding like one more cranky fart lamenting the good old days, but hang on, it takes me a few licks to get good and wound up.

While we of the sweating classes were straining the limits of our educations to read the new fangled TV Guide, the smarter bugs were swarming elsewhere to build colonies of their own. People more relentless in the pursuit of actual intelligence -- the cognitive elite, as they have been called -- were aggregating in universities, scientific laboratories, publishing and financial institutions... Bright folks who understandably enjoyed each other's company much more than beer drinking and arm wrestling contests with the rest of us down South or out in the lonelier reaches of Midwest. Predictably enough, they married their own kind -- everyone being smarter, better educated and having a reasonably attractive number of remaining teeth -- and raising similarly bright children in neighborhoods of other like couples. From that point all it took was social, political and professional networking, and a diligent sex life of course, for them to become a class apart from the majority.

In fact, they considered themselves the majority (and still do.) When they looked around in their communities, they saw themselves. They saw people who had read a good book recently, people who understood the ramifications of compound interest, office politics and cheese fondue too close to bedtime. There was not a bus driver or carpet layer or cop in sight. America to them was Scarsdale or Brookline or a variation thereof, where everyone's job consisted of fiddling around with some type of paperwork or other in as serious a manner as possible, pursuits such as academia, advertising or market research, or perhaps physics and engineering, developing resource gobbling "modern miracles" of the suburban lifestyle such as central air, and more currently, ominous ones such RFID chips for our driving licenses as an intermediate step on their way into our necks. But these were not real jobs mind you, not the kind that made you sweat, but the fun kind the rest of us saw on television with pretty, wise cracking secretaries who seemed to regulate traffic in riotously enjoyable workplaces. The kind of workplace Dick Van Dyke had. And they sure looked like they were getting smarter. And richer too. I remember my family's amazement when Laura bought a $40 outfit: "A clothes horse is what that woman is!" declared my old man. But I'm sure he thought to himself: "Nice legs though." These people, who invariably lived Up North somewhere, even played tennis and golf and ate things like chicken a la king, whatever the hell that was. They were definitely "holding the good end of the stick."

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